Finding Faith---A Search for What Makes Sense
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About this ebook
Does having faith mean abandoning reason? It's easy to get that impression. Still, it seems reasonable that a supremely intelligent God would want you to use your God-given intellect on your spiritual journey as much as in any other aspect of your life.
Faith may not stand on rational thinking alone, but a solid faith should walk hand in hand with intellectual integrity.
- Does it really matter what I believe?
- What is the relationship between faith and knowledge?
- Why are there so many religions?
- Do all paths lead to the same God?
This book helps you sort through the questions, objections, and concerns you can't help but raise. A Search for What Makes Sense will help you think your way clearly and honestly to answers that satisfy because they're your answers--conclusions you've arrived at personally without manipulation, coercion, or game-playing.
For faith to exist and grow it's got to make sense--good sense, carefully-thought-out sense. And chances are it does.
FINDING FAITH
The Finding Faith books A Search for What Makes Sense and A Search for What Is Real don't try to tell you what to believe; they are guides in learning how to believe. If you think the spiritual journey requires turning your back on honesty and intellectual integrity, these two companion volumes will speak to both your mind and your soul.
Brian D. McLaren
A former college English teacher, Brian D. McLaren was a pastor for twenty-four years. Now he’s an author, activist, public theologian, and frequent guest lecturer for gatherings in the U.S. and internationally. His work has been covered in TIME Magazine, Newsweek, USA Today, The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, and many other media outlets. The author of more than 15 books, including Faith After Doubt, Do I Stay Christian?, and A New Kind of Christian, he is a faculty member of The Living School at the Center for Action and Contemplation. McLaren lives in Florida.
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Reviews for Finding Faith---A Search for What Makes Sense
9 ratings1 review
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5McLaren helps those of us who have deep-seated questions about God, religion, and life to find answers. He does not preach or force any belief system on the reader. Rather, he gets into semantics to destroy the preconceived notions put into your brain by your parents and/or church, and then teaches you to question for yourself. An excellent book and very thoughtfully done.
Book preview
Finding Faith---A Search for What Makes Sense - Brian D. McLaren
Preface: A Note to My Readers
Several months ago I took a day off to walk along a favorite stretch of the Potomac River, where it winds through the Appalachian Mountains before entering the coastal plain of Maryland where I live. It was a day to think, to sort through some of my questions and doubts, to struggle with some new understandings that were forcing my faith to adapt and stretch to new dimensions. It was also a day to think about what would go into this book.
I remember reaching a certain point along the old towpath just below one of the locks of the old C & O Canal. A very simple thought dawned on me there: I need faith. Here I am, someone who is writing a book on faith, and I am realizing as never before how I need faith, not only to live my daily life to the full, but also to grow and nurture and sustain my faith itself and, too, to write the book you are now holding.
I suspect that the very act of reading this book will be an act of faith for you, just as writing it is for me. Realizing this, I imagine you now walking with me alongside the river and you and I being, as of this moment, on a journey of faith together. This book can become our extended conversation.
I realize that for some readers it is easy to relate to the experience of walking along a beautiful bend in a river, speaking of faith, shaded by tulip poplars, sycamores, and black, white, and red oaks. Many readers have friends with whom they can easily and freely share their questions about life and its meaning and purpose, their stories of faith and doubt, their struggles with deep questions that murmur in the back of their minds like the river beside the path.
But I know that other readers find it hard to relate. Perhaps you have nobody you can talk to about these matters; your faith journey is, so far, a lonely one. Or perhaps the whole subject of faith is painful for you. For you, faith is make-believe, self-hypnosis, manipulation, group hysteria, anti-intellectualism, obscurantism, closed-mindedness, backwardness, guilt, pressure, dishonesty — these negative images or associations clash harshly with the image of a peaceful walk along the river. Or maybe for you, faith is like death or sex, a subject you know you shouldn’t deny or avoid, but one that is profoundly uncomfortable. You wish, and I wish for you, that faith could be a subject of joy, vitality, hope, and healing.
It is for people like you — people who struggle with faith — that I have written this book. The people for whom faith comes easily and whose faith is never called into question probably would never pick up a book like this anyway (although I wonder if it might do them some good if they did).
I am grateful for the people of Cedar Ridge Community Church in Spencerville, Maryland, who have helped me learn faith in so many ways ( www.crcc.org). A community of faith where love and hope abound is a too-rare thing these days, and such a community of faith that provides a safe place for people who express questions and doubts is even rarer. I am privileged to enjoy such a community.
Both in the church and in my associations outside of it, I have made many friends who would call themselves atheists or agnostics, or who follow religious paths very different from my own. Several of them (Glenn, Gregg, Tony, and others) agreed to read this manuscript and field test
it for me. I thank them for their insights, questions, and responses, which have made this a better book than it would have been.
As always, I am grateful for my best friend and partner, Grace, and for our four amazing kids, Rachel, Brett, Trevor, and Jodi, who are launching their own journeys of faith. Of course, I could also mention the one to whom I am grateful for all of these wonderful people, and for the beauty of that stretch of the Potomac River, and for all of the rich experiences of life. But that’s getting ahead of myself, because that’s who this book is ultimately about.
Let’s keep walking together.
Introduction: Why Is the Search for Faith So Hard?
I think I reached my first faith crisis at about age twelve. From my earliest childhood, I have loved science — especially learning about animals and nature. (I will still choose a nature show on TV over just about anything else.) By the time I finished junior high school, I had checked out and read almost every nature-related book in our local public library, including a couple of college textbooks. My first faith crisis hit when someone at my church said that people had to choose between God and science. I just couldn’t understand this.
Looking back over the subsequent years, I would say that crisis management
described my faith experience. It was a cyclical story of hope followed by disillusionment, elation at finding the answer
or the ultimate faith formula followed by depression when the easy answers and formulas didn’t work. At several junctures I imagined that I would live the rest of my life without faith — finding and keeping faith was just too hard.
But somehow, in the process of seeking a faith that is real and makes sense, I ended up with a faith that has sustained me. That faith still involves crises from time to time. It hasn’t provided me an exemption from life’s ups and downs, nor has it given me a get out of doubt free
card. But somehow, my faith has evolved from being part of the problem of my life, something I was always trying to resolve, to part of the solution for my life, something that most often sustains me and gives me resources to face life’s challenges.
Through all of these experiences of faith, I have never forgotten what it feels like to be in the midst of struggle, when faith is a problem, when finding and keeping faith seems impossibly difficult. I hope my reflections on faith can be of some help to you, whether you are seeking a faith you have never had, trying to recover a faith you lost, or trying to hold onto a faith that seems to be slipping through your fingers.
Dimensions of the Quest
Let’s be realistic about the tough challenge you’re taking on. This quest is no Sunday school picnic. To begin with, you are going to have to think harder and bigger than you ever have, because although good faith isn’t limited to the mind, it requires the mind to be fully engaged.
The search for faith also involves noncognitive parts of us — emotions, longings, aspirations, dreams and hopes and fears, drives, desires, intuitions, and experiences. It often forces us to face some ugliness in ourselves, some hard facts about life and our world, requiring courage, honesty, and determination. Faith involves admitting with humility and boldness that we need to change, to go against the flow, to be different, to shine the harsh light of scrutiny on our cherished illusions and prejudices and face them with candor, and to discover new truths that can be liberating even though they may be difficult for the ego, painful to the pride. The search for a faith that makes sense has been the most challenging and life-changing quest of my life. Nobody should expect something this important to be easy.
Whom Can You Trust?
Another challenge: To whom do you talk about this search? Perhaps you could go to a minister, pastor, rabbi, or priest. But don’t they have a vested interest in the outcome of your search? Can you trust them to be unbiased, or might they push you, stack the deck, suppress some evidence and inflate other evidence, trying to sell you on their brand, subtly making it hard for you to say no?
You might go to a counselor, but then again, the counselor may see your search as a pathology and try to cure you of it.
It’s not always easy to consult your spouse, either. Searching for God? I just wish you would help with the dishes or clean out the car,
you might hear. Or, You don’t have to become more spiritual, dear, just less grouchy.
Or, So now it’s spirituality. I wonder how long this will last.
A friend’s response might be similarly discouraging: Oh, great! Does this mean you won’t play cards with us anymore? Are you going to make us hold hands in restaurants and pray before we eat? Will I have to apologize from now on if I say a four-letter word in front of you?
You might consult a college professor of comparative religion or a historian conversant with the development of world religions, someone for whom the subject is purely abstract and academic. But might her very objectivity and professional detachment create another set of problems? Wouldn’t you find yourself apologizing for taking this whole thing so seriously — so personally — in the first place? Wouldn’t you find it hard to express your personal longings in the company of someone who studies those very personal longings as sociological or psychological or historical phenomena?
Thankfully, there are some friends, ministers, counselors, and professors who could be of real help to you in your search, who understand your desire for unhurried and unpressured guidance, who will not coerce you to conform your search to their expectations, who will offer guidance while leaving room for you to reach your own conclusions. I hope I can be of help to you in precisely this way. I have served as a pastor for twenty-four years, but before entering ministry, I worked in higher education, as an academic counselor and college English instructor. Over the years, I have become more and more sensitive to the predicament of the intelligent adult — young, middle-aged, or senior — who begins searching for faith, for spirituality, and for God. I can’t pretend that I am completely neutral, a totally objective third party. Here is my bias: I sincerely hope you find what you are looking for. I hope you will become one of a growing movement of people who are seeking good faith
— the kind of faith that will make your life a better life so you can help make our world a better world. It is toward that end that I am dedicating myself in these pages.
Your Search
If I understand you and your situation correctly, there are two things your search is not. On the one hand, it is not an act of desperation. You are not in such a frenzied or fearful emotional state that you are willing to believe anything as long as it brings relief. Sadly, some people are reduced to this condition, and they jump on the assembly lines of cults and extremist groups, ready to conform, ready to make false confessions, ready to sacrifice their personal responsibility for the benefit of belonging to a group that is sure about everything.
No doubt there are troublesome things from which you seek relief, and conversely, better things you desire: a sense of purpose for your life, perhaps; forgiveness and peace to replace the guilt and fear that nag you; an integrated philosophy or worldview that makes sense of life with all its grandeur and squalor; an explanation for the spiritual experiences and sufferings that have come unbidden into your life. But these triggers to your search require something more than a desperate emotional placebo for you. You would actually aspire to know some truth. Your search is for a relationship with a God who really exists, and if no such God exists, then you want to know that too, straight up.
On the other hand, your search can’t be reduced to a merely objective, detached, theoretical, academic investigation. One of my favorite novelists, Walker Percy, loved to picture the difference between your search and the more objective, abstract type of search with a story that went something like this: Imagine a group of physicists and astronomers gathered for a lecture on cosmic background radiation. As the lab-coated lecturer drones on, the scientists are listening, taking notes, rubbing their chins, crossing and uncrossing their legs, maybe nodding a bit, occasionally mumbling, Interesting,
or something of that sort. Suddenly, a woman walks briskly onto the stage and whispers something in the lecturer’s ear. He hands her the microphone and she says, Ladies and gentlemen, a fire has broken out in the lobby. Please stay calm. Leave quietly and quickly through the exits on your left. Do not use the rear exits, as they are already smoke-filled and unsafe. Please follow me — this way.
At this moment, no one keeps rubbing his chin, crossing and uncrossing her legs, taking notes, or mumbling, Interesting.
The reason? Before, during the lecture, their situation allowed them the luxury of abstracted, disinterested detachment. But now, their real-life situation has been addressed, and the category of communication has changed from knowledge or information (a lecture on astrophysics) to news (of a threat to safety and life and how to escape it). Flooded and numbed by information as we are, it is often hard for any message of news to get through to us. Life often has to send us some pretty strong wake-up calls to make us susceptible to news, open to it, hungry for